Never a Damsel in Distress
by Inamioly
Summary: Another take on the events of S6Ep21 Sensitivity day . What if Meredith had not found Owen? Who would have comforted Cristina?


**A/N: A brand new story, a brand new day, a brand new pairing. Enjoy! I need reviews to live, people, they are the O in my oxygen, the W in water, I need them, okidoki?**

**P.S. As far as I can tell, only the main idea, the one from which everything else will evolve, equals the one in the show, but my humble apologies if, for any reason, I need to be stand corrected.**

**Summary: **_**What if Meredith had failed to find Owen (after Cristina comforted that young girl, following her mom's death)? Who would come to her help? Who would be the one comforting her?**_

"_Get Owen!" Cristina begged, her hand trying, fruitlessly, to twist the doorknob._

"_O… okay." Meredith acquiesced, failing to conceal the worry in her voice. "You'll be okay?"_

"_Go, Mer!" Her words trembled, and the blonde gasped inwardly._

"_But-"_

"_Please."_

**Space here. Space here. Space here.**

Cristina held her breath. She kept the air in her lungs for longer than necessary, and her hand kept trying to get the doorknob to twist and let her inside the highly appealing room. Following many ineffective attempts, she had yet to renew the oxygen she had breathed with such intent. Her mind had told her, lied to her, promised her the sobs would stop should she hold her breath. And Cristina, very un-Cristina-like, dismissed the surgeon in her, and complied.

"Open, open. Please, open." She murmured imploringly, finally respiring.

The door to the doctors' room would not open.

**Space here. Space here. Space here.**

"Owen, Owen, Owen." Meredith whispered at every corner, prisoner of her own conflicted crusade. "Where's Owen…?"

The reception area was all but empty, what with the busy atmosphere that soared over the hospital's head that day, and still she could not find Owen Hunt. She did not want to, either, but she had been given that mission, and she knew that to be one of the few times when Cristina's request ought not to be ignored.

"Owen… where the hell is that lying, good-for-nothing, PTSD Irish man?"

She sighed in defeat as one of the busy nurses grabbed her by the elbow and silenced her furtive, hissed tirade, babbling something about Dr. Sloan needing someone to scrub in with right away.

**Space here. Space here. Space here.**

Cristina glanced up, her eyes desperately seeking for that brilliant light that would compose their excuse for being watery. The stubbornly closed door sniggered silently. The corridor was surprisingly empty, the screams and hectic looks meaning nothing but a portrait she saw through a square window. All was quiet. Quiet, like the fraction of a second she had held her father's head on her lap and heard his unsteady breathing come to a halt; quiet, like the moment after the life in his eyes was replaced with a sea of endless blankness; quiet, like the words she had tried to get her brain to speak after the paramedics arrived to the scene and demanded to know what had happened; quiet, like her mother's cry when they both got home and went their separate ways, to separate beds, to separate dreams.

Quietness. Felt heavier on her shoulders than any burden would have.

And then she remembered. She was a surgeon, a cardiothoracic-wannabe, and a more than capable someone to slice through the layer of quietness that threatened to collapse over her.

"Somewhere… over the rainbow…" She tried, her voice too lethargic to answer her prayers. Leaning against the wall, she let her sore body slide slowly downwards. "Blue… birds fly." Cristina let the last word fade away, as she knew no other would come out of her mouth in the nearest future. The word settled in, echoed, and then… silence.

No, noise. A pair of seconds with blissful noise. Her eyebrows rose up in curiosity, but, as swiftly as it had breached through the slender walls of her mind, the noise vanished. Into thin, unappreciated air. No screamed requests for charts, no yelps of pain. Just silence, once more. And the faint sound of a door sliding open and, afterwards, close.

"I knew… I knew you weren't okay."

Cristina scoffed inwardly at the voice, and tried to ignore the footsteps towards her.

"Yeah, because I am such the damsel in distress." She smirked, looking up at Jackson. "My finger must be bleeding… Oh, ups, no, it isn't." She eyed her hand and shook her head, her lips pressed tightly together in hostility. "No Cinderella fairytale for me. What must it be…?" She wondered aloud in mock, glaring seriousness.

"Cristina…" Jackson pleaded in a soothing tone. "Let m-"

"Oh, I know. Did I forget my polished, shimmering, crystal shoe near you just as I ran away from your incredibly truthful and sensitive words?" She gesticulated one foot in front of him. "Nop, two lousy snickers and no crystal shoe lacking its identical twin." She eyed him, an eyebrow defiantly raised. "So the question remains unanswered."

Jackson remained silent. "Why… are you here?" Cristina demanded once more, lowering her pitch. Jackson sucked a breath and stared down at the ground, defeated. "I am no damsel in distress. No, I'm not. I am… much more… than that." A sob escaped her mouth. "I don't… I need… I need…" A tear left her eye, wetting the eyelash.

Jackson sat down next to her, encountering no resistance on her behalf, at last.

"It's okay." He tentatively placed an arm around her waist and pulled her onto him. "You hear me? It's okay."

"No… no, it's not." Still repressing most sobs, she allowed herself to rest against his chest. "Dad… Dad died. I'm a brilliant surgeon, and Dad died from something I now could have fixed in my sleep. I… I… he could have been here with me… right now… had I been able to… to…"

"Don't be stupid." Jackson interrupted her whimpering with severely spoken words. Cristina looked up into his face, stunned. "Don't be stupid."

"O… okay?" She whispered, hesitant.

"Okay." He squeezed her hand and rested his chin on her hair. "Good. I'm glad." He focused on the floor. "Now you can cry."

"No…"

"No?"

"The silence… it's the silence. I can't cry… when it's quiet." She admitted in a low murmur.

"Oh…" He brushed her arm. "Then I'll be introducing you to the real fairytales… You seem to have got quite a few mixed up. While you cry."

**Space here. Space here. Space here.**

"Cristina, I'm sor-" Meredith harshly opened the door to the empty corridor, commencing a torrent of excuses, until her eyes fell on Jackson and Cristina, the latter barely conscious of her surroundings, her eyes closed. "Oh."

"She was not okay." Jackson stated nonchalantly, the tremble to his voice betraying some badly concealed concern.

"Right." Meredith suddenly smiled. "I know. She was far from okay. But she is okay now… right?"

Jackson nodded.

"Good. Because, you know, I am her person." Meredith explained in a murmur, quietly approaching the sitting couple. "And she asked me, and no-one else, to find Owen. So I went to find Owen, but just because I am her person, you know? I went to find Owen, but I he was nowhere to be seen. Hiding, I think. So I failed her, and-"

"Owen? Like, in Hunt? She asked you to find Hunt…" Jackson sighed and leant back his head with a sad smile.

"Yes. Yes, she did." Meredith concurred. "But I did not find him, so I thought I had failed her, my person…"

"I see." Jackson nodded, casting Cristina a subtle, surrendered look.

"But now I see I didn't. I didn't fail her." She grinned at him. "_You_ were here."

**A/N: Should I continue this? Review, people, and let me understand what goes on your deeply complicated minds, so as to see what I should do in order to improve my stories.**

**Jackson and Cristina, oh yeah!**

**Kisses, **

**Febya**


End file.
